Rose Macaulay - Softcover

'LeFanu makes a good case for a re-evaluation of Macaulay as a writer as well as presenting us with some important new material' - LITERARY REVIEW 'This biography intrigues as a record of a woman's life on the cusp between tradition and freedom' - FINANCIAL TIMES 'Sarah LeFanu uncovers the life in an admirably calm and orderly fashion' - THE SPECTATOR 'a magnificent job...imaginative and thoughtful, dense with distilled information ...' Diana Souhami, Independent 'rich and perceptive...Sarah LeFanu (is) an able and astute judge of Macaulay's writings' Miranda Seymour, TLS 'This is a well-researched, balanced, lively and very readable life ...' Jane Gardam, The Oldie.

In a writing career that covered the first fifty years of the twentieth century, Rose Macaulay produced twenty-three novels, six books of criticism, four books of travel and history and two collections of poetry, as well as a huge correspondence with her friends, figures such as Elizabeth Bowen, Virgina Woolf, EM Forster and TS Eliot. She gave the impression of being sexually uninterested in men ('she looked like a eunuch', said catty Virginia Woolf who did not take kindly to the fact that Rose's books were more popular than hers), while for a quarter of a century she was passionately in love with a married man. The relationship ended only with his death in 1942. A great comic writer who excelled at satire, she was also an innovator and experimenter and a sharp and invigorating commentator on matters of popular and public interest.